


Blood to Thrive

by Azzandra



Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Minor Character Death, Tanaris, in between doing dubious errands for shady individuals, minor questline retelling, pondering the ethics of adventuring, some attempt at worldbuilding is made but honestly what even is WoW's timeline, very thinky character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 17:47:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17288591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: It was the nature of adventurers, she supposed, that their morals were as mismatched as the pieces of equipment they picked up along the way. A bit of coin could make many a dubious proposition seem more reasonable than it truly was, especially when each adventurer had in their heads the running tally: food to pay for, pets or mounts to feed, equipment to pay repairs for, and how expensive to travel to the next waystation? Would the money last until the next town? Would they need to spend the night out in the wild instead of an inn? The mental ledger needed to manage the finances of adventuring had the bad habit of drowning out all the less important little functions of the mind, such as the screaming voice of conscience.





	Blood to Thrive

Well, when it came down to it, Evelyn was the one who decided to become an adventurer and therefore had nobody else to blame.

Tanaris was an oppressive stretch of land, the heat pounding down like a physical weight. Her worgen sight was as good as a night elf's during the night, but during the day there was always a white haze to everything, stopping her from seeing very far. Usually she relied more on smell and sound during the day, compensating well enough that she had never had issues navigating in the daytime.

But Tanaris smelled like nothing but dust and blood. Her nostrils were clogged, and the hazy quality of her daytime sight was turned to impenetrable white opacity under the relentless desert sun. So she traveled at night instead, even with the frigid night air squeezing her chest so that every breath was a struggle.

At least, with the large moon hanging gibbous in the sky, there was enough light to see by; it reflected against the dunes, and with the tint of Evelyn's night vision, it gave everything the appearance of a frozen ocean.

During the day, she made camp under the sand and slept, burrowing the way she'd learned from adventurers going the other way after having passed through Tanaris already. There were always one or two who'd been through where she was going towards, and in the easy camaraderie of a shared campfire, many were willing to impart their wisdom and hard-earned lessons.

Here she was, then, to and fro-ing between errands and tasks at the advice and recommendations of strangers.

And a tip from an old adventurer was the only reason she stopped at Sandsorrow Watch, a speck of a camp outstripped by the grandeur of its own name.

* * *

The high elf in charge of the camp was a blacksmith, and there would probably have been a joke about ruling with an iron fist in there somewhere, if Trenton Lighthammer hadn't turned out to be remarkably even-handed. 

He had developed a years-long obsession with finding a legendary troll sword called Sul'thraze, a formidable blade made up of two swords, and he had set up camp in Sandfury territory in an attempt to locate its component parts. This was far from being the most eccentric thing anyone had done in pursuit of an obsession--at least in this case Evelyn estimated Trenton to be the practical sort, and that meant the sword almost certainly existed. Maybe. She was going to get pay out of this job for as long as she could, at any rate, and so she did not dissuade Trenton from his ambitions. She asked, instead, what he would like her to do.

Here came the first curl of distaste to his elegant features, as he sent her to talk to Mazoga. Trenton imparted that the troll was a Sandfury traitor, but he hadn't seemed entirely confident in the notion, and had given Evelyn a significant look to indicate she should not believe this information so readily either.

Still, it was clear that Trenton would pursue any lead to Sul'thraze, and according to him, the troll had been cooperative so far. It was progress by degrees, if nothing else.

The troll himself was...

Evelyn tried not to form an opinion too quickly. If there was one thing she ought to have learned from the worgen curse, it was to not judge any creature solely by its appearance. But Mazoga was straining that benefit of a doubt to the extreme, and Evelyn reconciled the impulses of her better nature with the leeriness he inspired by concluding that there were assumptions she had to cast aside.

For one, she had come across trolls before. Not exclusively on the battlefield either, because spending any amount of time in neutral territory meant running into them eventually, and while the Alliance and Horde pretended their borders were less porous than they truly were, Evelyn had had time to at least form an opinion on the various Horde races.

She had perhaps come to the conclusion that the differences between troll tribes were comparable to the differences between human nations, and that, say, the cultural gap between Darkspear and Sandfury was equivalent to that between a Gilnean and a Lordaeronian. Faced with the reality of the situation, she did not like having to conclude that there was a qualitative difference between those trolls in the Horde and the hostile tribes roaming the Tanaris desert, but... regardless of her philosophical conundrums, she would have found any given Darkspear a great deal less creepy than she did this one Sandfury.

Mazoga did not skulk, precisely, because there was something too confident in his loose-limbed grace to be described that way, but he put Evelyn in the mind of a scorpid, prowling the dunes to catch the unaware with its poisoned sting. He was completely unconcerned as he watched her approach, rolling on the balls of his feel and stretching to his full height in what might well have been a casual manner, if it wasn't a calculated reminder of how trolls could tower over every other race if they so chose.

There were bandages wrapped around his forearms and around his chest, but he reeked of old blood, not fresh, and the pallor of his skin, mottled by spots that looked closer to bruises, inspired more alarm than pity from Evelyn. It felt like some sort of trap, like one of those animals that feigned an injured limb to attract predators, only to then turn the tables on any that attacked them.

If a body was a temple, then this troll's body was one of those pyramids used for ritual sacrifices, stairs slick with the wash of blood. Which, fair enough. Troll temples did tend to be like that.

But when Mazoga grinned at her, it smelled like sweet rot, and his teeth were yellowed and stained with brown along the gums, and then Evelyn wondered, which part of the temple did that grinning mouth represent? The altar, perhaps; the sharpened ritual knife in the priest's hand, poised at the throat of the next victim.

* * *

"So, he sent yah to Mazoga for help wit' de sword, did he?" the troll asked, with a dark glee underlining his words. "We sort it out, no problem."

He gestured for Evelyn to approach, just a few steps nearer the edge of the camp, where they would overlook the desert. Evelyn glanced to the dunes, but couldn't quite quell the impulse to keep her eyes on Mazoga the entire time. If he noticed, he did not care.

They passed a cage, where a different Sandfury troll, armored lightly in the desert heat, crouched and glared at them malevolently. Or, rather, glared at Mazoga, perhaps finding Evelyn beneath his notice. She almost expected the troll to slam against the bars, or make some other abrupt motion to startle them, but he merely watched, and that was disturbing enough.

Mazoga halted just beyond the shadow of the camp, considering the rolling dunes of Tanaris with something like fondness.

"To survive in de harsh desert," Mazoga spoke, his demeanor growing somber, "de Sandfury had to learn all de secrets of blood magic. You drink de blood, you get de power... darkest voodoo, yah? But dere be no room for holdin' back out here." 

He gestured sharply, in a way that drew attention to his forearms. Like crushed flower petals releasing perfume, the gesture made the smell of blood in the air a bit sharper. The phrase 'darkest voodoo' resonated in Evelyn's head, like a refrain she'd heard before. She was sure it meant nothing good, and Mazoga must have noticed her discomfiture, because a smile started curling around his tusks again.

"If we gonna find de sword, we need blood. Lucky for ya, Mazoga be a traitor, yah?" He gestured out towards the dunes, deftly ignoring the glare that the caged troll was doubtless boring into the back of his head. "And dere be plenty of Sandfury trolls wanderin' over de hills dere."

"You don't mean..." Evelyn faltered a bit, because she couldn't quite believe he was sending her out to kill his fellows. Though, the more she thought about it, the more she could believe that, even were Mazoga not a traitor, he still would not hesitate to step over the corpses of other trolls to achieve his goals. She swallowed the protestations before they fully formed.

Mazoga betrayed no trace of sentiment towards the Sandfury, one way or the other. His nostrils flared in amusement--or at least some dark kin of amusement--before he pointed towards the open dunes.

"Go an' get Mazoga blood... plenty of blood... and we make de ritual to find Jang'thraze."

* * *

The sun was still blasting down with force when Evelyn found herself waylaid by one of the goblins in camp, Gus Rustflutter. He was fretful as he pointed to his wife, laid out on a mat in the shadow of the tower and burning with fever.

"She must've been stung by the scorpids near here!" the goblin said, wringing his hands as he cast her concerned looks over his shoulder. " I've seen it happen, it's not pretty. I gotta get some poison glands to make an antidote but I can't leave her side! Please, help me! Get me those glands!"

He clung himself to the hem of Evelyn's robe, looking up with such a pleading expression that Evelyn wouldn't have refused to help even if she'd been disinclined from accepting the job.

She still had to gently wrench his hands off her robes before he accepted that she was going to get the glands, she promised, she'd go right away.

"Gus..." the poisoned goblin called out weakly, her voice barely above a whisper. "You gotta... get me one of them gnome medics..."

This request seemed to send Gus into new heights of distress.

"Chelsea, baby, that's crazy talk! You're delirious! Just hold on a while longer," he said, addressing that last part to her even as his eyes were turned to Evelyn, pleading.

It seemed awkward to stand around after that, and so, despite her habit of only braving Tanaris during the night, Evelyn departed immediately in search of-- She searched her memory and recalled she'd just promised to part some scorpids from their venom glands.

Well.

She stopped to take a drink and jot it down in her travel journal, and despite the fact that she was hardly likely to forget it, she wrote down Mazoga's request for Sandfury blood, as well. 

She packed her journal back up, and took another sip from her waterskin for good measure. She was as careful as she could be, but drinking with a wolf snout was more awkward than with a human mouth, and she had noticed the teeth marks that most worgen's waterskin tended to have along the neck. She lived in constant terror that she would one day drink too enthusiastically and manage to pop a hole in the waterskin, and here in the desert, that fear was less about looking silly and more about dying from thirst.

Squinting against the blinding luminescence of the sun, she advanced slowly, aware of the fact that there were scorpids in the area and that with the state of her eyesight, she might very well not see one until she was right on top of it.

She felt an unexpected twinge of nostalgia for the forests of Teldrassil, where she would hunt with the pack as they adjusted to their new bodies. She had never been the type, before the curse, to relish hunting even in theory. She'd never desired to try until she became worgen and the desire to hunt subsumed all human thought.

It was easier to bear if she accepted that she was not entirely human anymore. She could turn back into human shape, and sometimes did so during the day, when circumstances permitted. But there was an ill-ease to the experience, as if she had lost the trick to it. The worgen inside always felt ready to spill out, and she did not like the way she would assess every sliver of emotion or experience like it would be the crack through which the instincts would escape.

It was a different kind of unease from the one she felt in her worgen shape. Perhaps she ought to have felt less vulnerable in it; she was tall enough that she could be level to a troll's eye level, and equipped with enough sharp implements at the ends of her fingers to make short work of one, too, but instead of making her feel larger, being a worgen seemed to make the world contract around her, becoming smaller and more fragile. Claws were deadly in a hunt, but they also caught in fabric and ruined delicate objects that were easy to manipulate with human hands.

She felt, at times, like a woman who had escaped a housefire with nothing but two coats, both ill-fitting. It was more than other people had, and better than nothing, but that only engendered guilt if she complained about discomfort.

Her ears twitched at the sound of sand being disturbed, the dry whisper of many feet scurrying across the dunes. She tilted her head one way, then another, and though her sight failed her, she could hear the chittering of a scorpid and pinpointed its location.

This would not be a fair hunt, by nature's reckoning. No prey out there in the desert compared to the creatures of the forest, who were furred and warm-blooded, and perfect to sink one's teeth into. She wouldn't be able to hunt like a worgen. She wouldn't even hunt like a warrior would, running in with sharp weapons.

But she did have the Holy Light rising to her call, already preparing to smite the unfortunate creature, and failing that, she also had a mace, and liked going for the knees.

* * *

By the time she was done taking apart scorpids for parts, the sun had set. Under the moonlight, Evelyn could see the stretch of sand all the way to the horizon, broken up by jagged stone reaching to the skies, and the sad sunburnt watchtowers that dotted the landscape. 

Disturbingly, there was something akin to bones covering a valley in a distance, open like the ribcage of a giant creature, dead a long time and stripped of flesh, but for how the arched bones shook in the wind, twitching like fingers. She dearly hoped she would never have to go there, but acknowledged that the hazards of being an adventurer was that, anywhere she went, sooner or later, someone would hire her to visit the creepiest feature of the landscape. She put the matter aside for now.

She oriented herself until she was certain the watchtower before her wasn't Sandsorrow Watch, and she approached until she could see the Sandfury trolls who occupied it.

She skirted around the edges, picking off the one furthest away from the camp. He did not do the sensible thing and run for help; he chose to stand his ground and hurl axes at her instead. Evelyn was apparently not the only one who liked going for the knees, because a stone axe to the thigh almost toppled her over. She sank to one knee as she sent one last rancorous smite down the troll's way, and when he crumpled to the ground there was far more finality to it.

She called on the Light to heal herself, and tested her weight on the leg before approaching the dead troll. There was something disconcerting in the appearance of the Sandfury trolls. Their coloration tended to pale gold skin and blond hair that she would have associated with a sensitivity to sunlight in humans, but it made the Sandfury like a part of the landscape instead, some personification of the desert's malice.

She used her own claws to cut into the troll's flesh, preparing to collect his blood in a flask, but to her consternation, it was like squeezing blood from the proverbial rock. The troll was dead for only a minute, and yet did not bleed.

She cut deep into his arm, and had to press town on the flesh hard before the blood oozed out, so thick that she could pick it up in her hand like mud. It was the most disturbing thing she'd ever collected from the body of a dead thing, and as an adventurer, she had an expansive repertoire of harvesting unconventional materials from dead creatures.

Did the Sandfury have sand in their veins? Was this one sick somehow? Was this a curse? Was it something she'd done?

She rolled up a handful of blood into a cloth bag and decided not to question this too deeply.

But the next troll she killed had blood just as thick, and the one after that did not bleed even as much as the first two, and she could not collect any off that body.

* * *

When Evelyn reached Sandsorrow Watch again, the first gray tide of dawn was washing over Tanaris. Gus was still fretting a great deal over his wife, and Evelyn handed him the scorpid glands if only to stop the goblin from working himself up into a froth. He actually had tears in his eyes as he pushed coins into Evelyn's hands, and she actually didn't think it was because he had to part with money, which was novel for a goblin.

He took the glands and ran off to alchemize them into an antidote, and Evelyn took the opportunity to sink down against a nearby crate.

Chelsea didn't seem to be in any worse of a state than when Evelyn took off, and her fever wasn't so high that she seemed in imminent danger. Her eyes fluttered open when Evelyn pressed her fingers against the goblin's forehead to check, and though her eyes were a bit glazed over, she didn't look delirious.

Evelyn couldn't see a sting, anywhere, either.

"Water?" Evelyn said, pouring a bit from her own waterskin into a mug near Chelsea's mat.

"Ugh, thank you," the goblin said, and lifted herself on her elbows to drink.

"Food poisoning, huh?" Evelyn asked next.

"Yeah," Chelsea replied. "It's the worst." Then she dropped back to the sleeping mat, turning over and curling up in her misery.

Evelyn glanced sidelong to Gus, who was busy stirring up ingredients, still at his wit's ends, and apparently unaware of how unnecessary that was.

She decided not to say anything, and quietly staked out a spot under the watchtower's shadow to make camp.

* * *

She woke up at the hottest time of day, exhausted and overheated, and crawled out of the nook she'd made for herself between crates to shake the sand off her robes. She put herself back together slowly, throwing on all the pieces she'd removed to sleep--her belt, her braces, her hood--and wonder if this was really preferable to paying extortionate prices in Gadgetzan for a proper room.

Instead she was charged extortionate prices for a bit of something to drink by one of the goblins at Sandsorrow Watch, and she didn't even grumble as she paid for a pints worth of moonberry juice.

Mazoga spotted her, and raised an eyebrow at her.

"Yah got de stuff?" he asked.

"I got _some_ stuff," Evelyn said reluctantly, and then removed from her pack the small sack she used to gather the blood, opening it to reveal the blood inside. Neither the passage of time nor the heat seemed to have had any significant impact on the substance. She did not smell rot, only the dusty tang of blood on the air, mixing a fresh metallic note into the general aroma of death that permeated Tanaris.

Mazoga inspected the blood, humming thoughtfully like an alchemist assessing ingredients. He poked at it, smearing a bit between his fingers.

"Nah, mon, we be needin' more den that," he said, shaking his head and handing the sack back. His face broke into a grin then, less teasing and more taunting, "Ya ain't been drinkin' it yaself, eh? I need all of it."

A wave of revulsion rose in Evelyn's chest as the suggestion, but she suspected that was the intended purpose of his words, so she smothered it instead. She'd drunk blood as well, after all. There'd been no voodoo to it, but she knew the taste of it as intimately as she knew the heat of it pouring down her throat. 

"I'll get more soon," she said instead.

Mazoga shrugged, cheerfully uncaring about how quickly she intended to carry out the task.

"Don' get yaself killed, now," he said. 

She appreciated the warning, though she wasn't sure about its sincerity.

* * *

Evelyn hunkered down in the shade to drink her overpriced moonberry juice. It was lukewarm, which was objectively the worst temperature at which to drink moonberry juice. You could drink it mulled on a cool evening, or perfectly chilled in specially enchanted cups, and she'd tried it both ways and liked it fine. But something about being room temperature gave moonberry juice an unpleasant aftertaste, like chewing on a sock.

She capped the jug and put it in her pack, trying not too think on whether moonberry juice could go off, and as she sorted through the contents of her backpack, she found herself holding the sack of troll blood again.

There wasn't anything inherently attractive about the scent of blood, she told herself. Finding it enjoyable in the context of a hunt was one thing. Consuming blood which had belonged to a thinking creature, though, felt like skirting a bit too close to cannibalism.

The more she sniffed it, the more she couldn't find anything amiss about the smell. The texture was still all wrong, like it was some sort of sandy run-off instead of a proper liquid, and she couldn't quite figure out why. It had to be some kind of magic, because there was no way this was a natural feature of biology. She'd seen other trolls bleed, she knew this wasn't right.

None of this was right, she thought, and picked up an entire fistful of the blood. It had taken undue effort to coax it out of the dead trolls, and she shouldn't be wasting it, but...

It was just blood, wasn't it? You couldn't learn anything from drinking it. Probably. Most definitely not.

Her tongue lolled out, licking a strip of the too-thick blood off her hand, and dragging it back into her mouth. She'd hunted and she'd drunk blood before. This was not too far removed, she thought.

She expected the taste to be like wine and dust, but it was the cloying coppery smell of blood that clogged her nostrils, and deeper than her borrowed predator's instinct ran a vein of genuine fear, all of her own. The sandy blood mixed with her saliva, turning into something closer to liquid, but she found herself chewing on it reflexively, the texture completely wrong, either for blood, or for food, or for any other substance. 

She was so focused on the strangeness of the experience, that she did not notice Mazoga until he crouched next to her, settling his elbows on his knees and giving her his leering grin, but not saying anything. 

Evelyn nearly choked, inhaling a bit too sharply, and snorted uncomfortably as she tried to avoid coughing.

It was only then that Mazoga reached out a hand, and sank it in the mane at the nape of her neck. Evelyn had the frightening initial thought that he was trying to pet her, or something equally galling, but she felt his fingers tighten in the fur, his grip like iron as he pulled and tilted her head backwards.

The blood slithered down her throat as obediently as a mage's familiar, liquid like tar, and slicking the inside of her mouth with its tang, and Evelyn felt her panicked breathing ease.

Mazoga released his grip on her mane, but tugged on one of her small braids before retracting his hand completely. It was a playful gesture, and the notion of pulling a girl's pigtails floated into Evelyn's mind momentarily, before being capsized by a wave of embarrassment.

"Ya wouldn't want dat kind of stuff goin' down de wrong pipe, mon," Mazoga said, still crouched next to her. She couldn't precisely gauge his mood, but he didn't seem amused, despite his grin. He felt angry to her, though he didn't show any of the outward signs. Or, maybe proprietary.

It occurred to Evelyn she might have broken some norm of troll conduct she had not been aware of. She'd certainly overstepped, and made more work for herself. It reminded her-- She tried to swallow back the memory and the embarrassment, but it reminded her of being at a tea party as a teenager, when she'd accidentally stirred her tea with the sugar spoon, and the way everyone had balked and had pointedly turned their eyes away from her blunder in a way that made it clear to her that she had indeed blundered.

It was an absurd comparison--now it gave her a mental image of Sandfury trolls sitting down for afternoon tea, and their chairs legs were made of bones, and their cups were full of blood--but whatever troll social norms she'd flouted, it was too late to take it back, and so she went forward.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For wat'?" Mazoga shrugged, feigning indifference. "Ya woulda been de one to die, not me." Then, after a moment's consideration, "Would have inconvenienced Mazoga terribly to find someone else to run around de desert, tho'. So yah do well ta apologize." His smile turned meaner somehow. "But don' do dat ever again."

She thought he would get up and walk away after that, but instead he gripped the end of one of the bandages around his arm, and pulled hard. The air already reeked of blood, her nostrils were filled with nothing but the smell of it, but the impression of blood deepened as wounds bloomed on Mazoga's forearms, cuts that had healed with the bandage encrusted in them, and that opened now that the bandage was ripped free.

She winced, but she watched as the blood beaded on Mazoga's skin, acting like proper blood should, and not like the sand clogging other Sandfury trolls' veins.

"Ya have ta know de strength you be seekin' to take, mon," he said, reaching for his other forearm, and ripping the bandages loose there too. "De voodoo don' live t'rough yah, so de blood don' flow for yah. In de mouths of our enemies, we be nothin' but ash an' sand. An' ya'll choke."

Unease crawled up and down Evelyn's back, and she nodded mechanically. Then, on an impulse that was completely detached from anything else happening, she reached into her pack and pulled out a few rolls of clean bandages, offering them to Mazoga.

This took him by surprise almost as much as it did Evelyn, but she held them out for him as a few seconds ticked by, and the constricting quality in the air eased; diffused, as if surprise had stopped it from building up to anything. Mazoga took the bandages with slow movements, like handling a viper, and unrolled one at a time to bind his forearms again. The blood soaked through almost instantly, soiling the clean silk, but this seemed to be the way he liked it.

He seemed to be seriously questioning what he was doing as he tied off the knots on his bandages, and looked at Evelyn like he was trying to figure her out, and displeased about it.

"Ya ain't so bad considerin'," he said eventually, and Evelyn took that to mean she wasn't so bad for someone who was not a troll. "Don' talk much. Keep all de words inside ya skull." He tapped his own temple for emphasis. "Smart girl. Nevah let dem know what yah thinkin'. Mazoga know a thing or two about dat."

Evelyn stared wordlessly, because she did not know how, or believe it was wise, to explain that she did not talk as much since the curse because the sound of her own voice sounded completely wrong to her own ears.

He gave a final grin before rising with lanky grace and walking off.

The smell of blood still clogged up Evelyn's mouth, and even drinking lukewarm moonberry juice didn't much help with that. It was her own fault, so she bore it.

* * *

Finding other Sandfury trolls wasn't hard, but they seemed to expect her after she had picked off some of them the night before. It would have been too easy to hope that they'd assumed the disappearances were a coincidence, and that the traces of the bodies be erased by the scavengers of the desert.

She killed one troll by ripping out her throat, and the taste of the sand-thick blood made Evelyn nearly sick up. She heaved several times, stomach doing wild flips as she willed it to keep its contents down, and she couldn't help but suspect it was Mazoga's doing somehow; a curse on her head for tasting Sandfury blood the first time.

She put the irrational thought aside as she harvested the blood, and quietly filled her sack.

Dawn was not yet broken when she returned to Sandsorrow Watch.

Mazoga was awake--she wasn't sure when or if he slept--and he seemed to smell the blood on her. His nostrils flared and his mouth fell half-open as if scenting the air.

She handed the bag to him without a word, and he untied it as eagerly as if it contained a Winter Veil gift, instead of the unnatural vital fluids of other trolls. Or, well... not fluids, exactly, Evelyn reminded herself, her nose scrunching in distaste.

Mazoga assessed the blood for a moment, before his hands sank in and gathered the piles of blood, raising them to his lips. When he tilted his head back and poured the blood into his mouth, it turned to liquid. She could see the dark rivulets running down his chin, dripping onto his chest. It reeked of magic more than of blood in the air, the stale incense scent that always clung to witchdoctors, or jungle mulch, or graveyard dirt, or all three. Evelyn didn't think she was perceiving it with her nose, no matter how fine her sense of smell was.

She saw Mazoga's throat bob as he swallowed, three times, four, and then his head tilted forward again, and she could see the look in his eyes--she got the impression of a second eyelid over his eyes, like the kind raptors had, but it was not something she was seeing, only the sense of it pressing against her mind's eye. Darkest voodoo, she thought. 

"Dey drink de blood, dey get de power. I drink dere blood..." 

He gave her a blood-smeared grin, licking a stripe of blood along the length of his forefinger, entirely too pleased with himself for the mess he'd made. But he seemed to wear the blood well, as if covered by gore was his natural state.

"The blood speaks. I can feel its flow through the sand... drenched in death, a desert of suffering..." 

He stiffened, suddenly, his eyes rolling back in his head. His motions were jerky, as if he was now merely puppet to forces stronger than himself, and Evelyn took a half step back. Whatever spirits Mazoga called on, they were not gentle with him, but she didn't yet know if anything had gone wrong with the process.

"There!" Mazoga's arm flung out to point past Evelyn, to the still-dark horizon. "The blood flows to the south, in a valley of bones. Zakkaru! Zakkaru, spawn of Makkari, the dark one who demands sacrifice... his father forced from Zul'Farrak, his ascension interrupted... he will taste blood once more..."

Then, as if the puppet's strings were cut, Mazoga reeled back, flung back into control of his body with little fanfare. The sense of dark magic in the air dissipated. He teetered on his feet, shaking his head and breathing in short gasps.

Evelyn thought he might topple over, and in an overzealous fit of compassion, stepped closer to catch him. But when she thought he was going to catch onto her to keep on his feet, he instead gripped her upper arm hard, apparently more in control of himself than she guessed. He smeared an ugly bloodstain into her robe sleeve, and pulled her close enough for her to feel the blood on his breath.

"Go, priest. Zakkaru has Sang'thraze. Ya not be wanting him to keep it, trust me," he said, more grimly than he'd delivered the contents of his vision.

Evelyn pulled back, his hand unpeeling from her sleeve with a wet squelch, and all but ran off on the spot. She managed only to nod wordlessly, and notice that the display had left her more lightheaded than it did him. She did not want to think too deeply on what that meant.

* * *

There was a valley, though there was also the spine of some ancient leviathan cresting a dune like a jutting crown. The sand was littered with bones stripped of flesh by desert winds and bleached to white by wind and desert sun. Air elementals prowled, feeding off the cutting desert gales, and she thought at first she would not know Zakkaru right away.

But she did know him by sight. Larger and angrier, lashed with lightning and thunderous as a summer storm, he turned angry eyes on her and knew right away what she'd come for.

"The Lasher is not fit for mortal hands!" he declared, voice coming like the echo of thunder far away. 

She called on the Light to preserve her, and pit herself against the elemental.

When it was all done, she came out the other side with wind-sheared cuts in her hide, with sand in her fur, with shaky knees and a bruised back from getting tossed hard against the sand. But she extracted from Zakkaru's remains the sword she had been seeking.

Sang'thraze was bound in wrappings, so tightly that she could trace its precise shape through them but not unwrap the sword from the tightly fitted material. Hexes were etched along the wrappings, nasty and biting as any desert creature. She did not contend with the coverings; she needed only to bring the sword.

When she returned to camp, she did not need to look for Mazoga. He appeared before her without summons.

"Did the spirits speak true, mon? You got it?" he asked, restlessly eager.

She offered him Sang'thraze, and his eyes lit up as he took it in both hands, weighing it reverently. It was only then, pleased with the result, that he looked her up and down, and noted her battered state.

"Didn't like ya much, eh?" he asked, apparently referring to Zakkaru. Evelyn gave a one-shouldered shrug, because she was fairly sure the other had been dislocated during the fight. "More in this world craves blood than just trolls, mon," he said, sounding oddly cheered by the notion. "Let's find the other blade."

* * *

Evelyn woke from fitful dreams to Trenton Lighthammer's hand on her shoulder. The high elf looked uneasy about waking her, but offered her a mug of water. It was cooler than any water she'd had since arriving in Tanaris, and she drank deeply, emptying the mug. She resisted the urge to lap at the drink, self-conscious at doing something so overtly worgen while under the scrutiny of someone who wasn't, but she was careful not to spill too much as she tipped the mug over her lip and poured the water directly down her throat. It was crisp and almost sweet, more delicious than she'd ever thought plain water could be.

Trenton sat down next to her bedroll, cross-legged and patient as only an elf could manage, and he accepted the mug when she offered it back. He'd offered her use of the watchtower to sleep during the day, its interior dark and surprisingly cool, as it loomed up above the sand. The day outside glowed bright white around the heavy curtain on the door, limning the material at the edges, but inside was dark and cool, and Evelyn's night vision took the narrow shafts of light that made their way in through the cracks as sufficient for seeing everything inside clearly.

Trenton's own eyes, blue from iris to sclera, did not glow like a night elf's might, but they seemed to be filled with an interior light anyway, mana-bright and alert to everything. Evelyn couldn't recall at that moment if high elves could see in the dark as well, though it would not have surprised her.

"I have heard you managed to find one piece of Sul'thraze," he said, taking out a waterskin, and topping off the mug again. Evelyn watched, her throat still scratchy with thirst.

"Sang'thraze," Evelyn confirmed.

"Yes. And Mazoga thinks it will help him find the other half?" Trenton continued, leaning forward in interest.

Evelyn shrugged, looking down to her mug instead. She swirled the water, wishing Trenton would leave so she could drink it properly.

"I'm asking because he's been staring at Sang'thraze and muttering to himself since you brought him the sword," Trenton continued.

Evelyn was fairly sure her face was completely blank at this--she didn't even know what reaction she was supposed to have to this information--but Trenton apparently was watching closely, and interpreted some kind of reaction on her part, because he nodded and leaned back.

"Of course, he has his ways," Trenton said, resigned with an undercurrent of distaste. "I can't argue with his methods so long as they yield results. But even if he is a traitor, one does wonder why he would... well, let's not overthink this." 

Trenton lapsed into silence for a few seconds, tapping a finger against his knee as he thought, then he sighed, and shook his head, making his lustrous white locks rearrange themselves over his shoulders.

He reached into the pouch on his belt, and removed several coins, which he pressed into Evelyn's hand.

"I expect you to keep up the good work," Trenton continued. "Until such a time as you must part ways with Mazoga, and then, I expect you to remember who is going to pay you for the sword."

"Alright," Evelyn said slowly, unsure where this was coming from.

Trenton seemed pleased with Evelyn's confused response, apparently reading more enthusiasm in it than Evelyn bothered to provide. He rose up from his cross-legged seat on the ground, with a fluid grace that gave testimony to his high elven heritage.

Once he was gone, Evelyn lapped all the water from the mug he'd left her. It had warmed a bit, but it quenched her thirst nonetheless.

* * *

Evelyn left the watchtower eventually, taking the sloping walk down the tower's ramp to stretch her limbs and inspect the camp below. Much as she'd have liked not to lapse into paranoia so soon after waking up, Trenton had put her into the mindset with that strange conversation whose subtext she failed to grasp. She couldn't tell if Trenton was trying to work her over, or if his concern was adequately justified by something.

'Get enough people working the right angles together, and you've made a perfect circle,' a goblin once told her, as he explained his method for putting together a smuggling ring. 

It had been a fascinating conversation, until Evelyn picked up on the fact that she was being chatted up, and had to explain--politely, because the goblin had been so as well--that she was not interested. 

The goblin had shrugged, and grinned, and thanked her for the conversation anyway, before turning to the tauren to his other side to try his luck there, and his attitude had done more to endear Evelyn to his flirtations than the myriad of human men who sought her interest by imbibing too much alcohol and yelling in her direction obscene questions about the number of nipples she possessed. 

Just once she would have liked to have a conversation which naturally evolved to the point where she could offer that information herself, because the answer was likely to surprise someone, but alas. It seemed that human men assumed any worgen women they met would find herself so distraught at suddenly becoming two heads taller and more hirsuit than a bear rug that they would proceed to throw themselves at any lout who showed an interest. Contrary to that, Evelyn had discovered upon becoming worgen that her romantic prospects had become more expansive, if not outright more interesting. She certainly wouldn't have had a goblin hitting on her while she'd been sequestered behind that wall in Gilneas, and so that was at least a new experience to have, if nothing else.

No, she'd been thinking of something else.

Angles, that was it. Why had she been thinking of angles?

The day was inching along a blistering late afternoon. The desert was quiet, the same way sound was hushed right after a heavy snowfall, except for the opposite reason. Chelsea and Gus Rustflutter were unboxing wares, after Chelsea had finally recovered from her miserable bout of food poisoning, and they waved at Evelyn listlessly, apparently sapped by all their strength in the remorseless heat.

The other goblin in the camp, Snart Razzlegrin, who'd sold her the overpriced and lukewarm moonberry juice, was slouched against a crate, and he attempted a grin in her direction, though it came out more as a half-hearted sneer. He was just as miserable as anyone in the heat, and Evelyn thought it served him right.

Trenton was nowhere to be seen for now, perhaps off to Gadgetzan for a supply run.

But Mazoga--

She found Mazoga hunched down in the sand behind a stack of crates--so many crates, what was in them all?--and she watched him from a distance at first, trying to puzzle out what was happening.

Sang'thraze was laid in the sand before Mazoga. It was a strangely shaped blade, ending not in a point but in a flare. She supposed perhaps the shape made more sense once it was combined with its other half. At first, Evelyn thought Mazoga was talking to the sword, which would not necessarily have been the strangest thing, but as she approached, her ears picked up on his mutters, and though the words were in Zandali, she rather thought that Mazoga was speaking to the spirits, or maybe his troll gods.

It discomfited Evelyn to interrupt such a thing, so she lingered awkwardly in the nearest shadow, outside Mazoga's way as she watched.

She had always preferred her relationship with the Holy Light to the bonds that others made with gods or spirits. It was a preference shaped largely by her perspective, she supposed. Not only that she was human, but that the Light was an impersonal thing--comforting and reliable, but ultimately devoid of sentient thought. It was a force, or a tool, and that might have been a caustically pragmatic outlook, devoid of any romance, but she could not imagine herself trying to navigate the personality of some fickle deity, or entreat with spirits whose drives and motivations she would have to sort through before she could arrive to a useful result.

She already balked at having to interact so with flesh and blood people. She could not imagine how much more exhausting such interactions would be with the incorporeal set.

After a while, Mazoga's muttering trailed off. Evelyn had been staring into space for a while, her attention diffused by the heat, but once he had finished with the spirits, Mazoga turned his attention to Evelyn, and she felt his gaze cut to her like a cold draft. He raised his hand to beckon her with a sharp gesture.

She scrambled a bit, sending sand flying around the hems of her robe as she got her feet under her, and she came near, crouching next to where he was sitting, and looking down at the sword.

"Jang'thraze eludes me, mon," he imparted, licking his dry lips as he wrapped up the bandages around his wrists, and tied them off one-handed. "De blood is not enough. We gonna need somethin' stronger to find it."

He eyed Evelyn, taking her measure in a way that implied he was about to ask her to do something distasteful. She imagined she would do it. She had done plenty of distasteful things in the past, if she was not doing so right now. Not simply wading into filthy places to collect dubious reagents, but doing things that might run contrary to her usual moral inclinations.

It was the nature of adventurers, she supposed, that their morals were as mismatched as the pieces of equipment they picked up along the way. A bit of coin could make many a dubious proposition seem more reasonable than it truly was, especially when each adventurer had in their heads the running tally: food to pay for, pets or mounts to feed, equipment to pay repairs for, and how expensive to travel to the next waystation? Would the money last until the next town? Would they need to spend the night out in the wild instead of an inn? The mental ledger needed to manage the finances of adventuring had the bad habit of drowning out all the less important little functions of the mind, such as the screaming voice of conscience. 

At the very least, some would recognize mistakes after they were made, and learn something from it. Many more, Evelyn had learned, would drift from task to task with minimal attention to the specifics, and cash in their rewards, and continue on with only a vague clue of what they'd done or the consequences of their actions. Adventuring was mostly hard days on the roads and sleeping rough, and Evelyn did not think very many of the people willing to live like this were the philosophical sort. Most just wanted to be given orders, and not spend too much time thinking about it.

It was a trap that was easy to fall into, no matter how dishonorable this pattern of behavior might've seemed from the outside. Evelyn couldn't judge too harshly when she herself drifted from place to place and task to task until they all blended together, and all the faces just as well--that much easier to assume the best intentions of anyone, and not press too deeply for details.

The worst, in her experience, were those who did consider themselves to be heroes on glorious quests, instead of freelance mercenaries. They tended to either rise in the ranks of the Alliance as monsters, or die at the hands of the Horde following severe miscalculation. She thought the Horde must've had a similar problem with this kind of individual, but she was not entirely sure of it. She had met enough Horde adventurers to infer that their average experience was not that far removed from their Alliance counterparts, but she was not so familiar with Horde society as to make assumptions on this front.

She wondered, sometimes, about this large itinerant population of adventurers, and how many of them had actual homes to go back to. She knew that she, herself, would not be on the road, scraping by through wit and applied violence, if Gilneas wasn't contested territory at the moment. And though she knew she might well be projecting, she suspected not all of the people she met had houses of their own, even if they perhaps had places they considered home. Were they all bands of well-armed, homeless drifters, amplifying conflict in a world already suffering from too much of it?

And even if all true, how would the larger philosophical implications even matter in her current situation? A moment's thought indicated that she should not be there, helping this incredibly suspicious individual, but she had her own mental ledger to contend with, and so there she was.

Mazoga apparently finished eying her, and snorted softly to himself, as if deciding she was not the ideal candidate for what he had in mind, but he was resigned to the choice anyway.

"When you need every troll you got to help out to scrape by," he began, in the steady rhythm of a lecture, "one o' them dyin' on ya is a big problem, mon." He watched to see she was following along before continuing, "An' dat's why de Sandfury learned to raise our dead wit' da voodoo. You fall over, you just get back up again and keep workin... forever!" He spread his hands out with a grin, taking some lurid pride in this ingenious solution his people had found to their personnel problem.

Evelyn had run across the undead trolls in the desert. She had assumed them to be the aftermath of some curse or punishment, but did not find it entirely shocking that they were merely victims of circumstance. The desert squeezed hard for every drop everyone had to give, and apparently that didn't stop after one dropped dead.

She nodded to show she understood.

"De zombies we make be imbued wit' darkest mojo. You go on to de west an' find a whole mess o' dem, an' get me dat mojo, yah?" Mazoga said, peering into her face. "Ya know wat' dat is, don't ya, mon? De mojo?"

Evelyn nodded again, less certain. She'd collected the stuff before, in some other place, on some other task. Mazoga seemed dubious about it, so she raised a hand, careful with her claws and ran the pad of one finger down Mazoga's arm. 

She'd learned to do this on dead trolls, but she found the trick was the same with living one. It was a bit like gathering the frothing sweat off their fuzz (another distasteful thing she'd done to a troll corpse), and when the mojo collected between her fingers like cottony static, she tilted her hand to show it to him.

Mazoga inspected the mojo with a grave mien, and then nodded as it dispersed in the air.

"Ya'll do, then," he said, his lip curling up in a nasty grin, "if ya got de stomach for it."

She wished, at times, that she had less of a stomach for all the things she was asked to do, but this was not the person to share her concerns with.

* * *

The zombies buried each other in the sand, like tools putting away tools when not in use. Evelyn witnessed this from afar, and tried not to think too much about the minutia of the kind of society which used its dead in this fashion. She did not think Mazoga would appreciate if she came back from this errand hefting around pity for him.

She killed the zombies she ran across, burning them in holy fire until it glowed from inside their mouths, and then collecting the mojo off them. It was black, cottony--she'd never seen it in this color, and Mazoga was not being metaphorical when calling it the darkest mojo, it seemed. When she was finished with the walking zombies, she dug into the sand for the ones she knew were buried under the mounds.

She expected them to stay restive so she could collect the mojo from them with less of a fight, but the moment she touched them, they sprung to life, vengeful and bloodthirsty, and she found herself pounding out their brains with her mace before they stopped moving.

She absolved herself of this task quickly, and rushed directly back to Sandsorrow Watch with all the dark mojo filling up a spare jar. It felt like a malevolent thing, the mojo, but considering its appearance, it also gave her the impression of being glared at by dustbunnies.

Mazoga lit up when handed the mojo, unscrewing the lid of the jar like he was trying to get at candy beans inside. He reached in fingers, gathering the fizzling mojo in his hands, and then inhaling the entire handful until it was gone.

The effect was electrifying, his body shuddering in pleasure, and his eyes, when he turned to her, seemed to stare into Evelyn right down to the pit of her soul. They flashed with spirit energy that seemed to crackle along his skin.

"Powerful stuff, mon..." he said. "Ah, if ya could see what I see now... mebbe you go try it yaself sometime." He gave her a nasty grin with that jab, and Evelyn recoiled at the reminder of her transgression.

But his attention wandered off her again, before Evelyn could have even responded, were she so inclined. His attention was far off.

"Yes, I see the other half now, mon... to the south..." His arm snapped to the south, finger pointing to the horizon. "We be close now, mon. It's in an oasis, buried in de muck beneath de water." 

He punctuated the statement with a jab to her forehead, and Evelyn flinched back, the image of the oasis flashing once in her mind's eye.

"Don't delay!" he said, the glow disappearing from his eyes as his voice grew more urgent.

No rest for the wicked, Evelyn supposed, and turned to leave for the oasis.

* * *

It was a mudhole, pure and simple. In Tanaris they might have called the piddly little pond an oasis, but Evelyn was certain she'd seen better drinking holes for animals. Still, what counted as a hopped-up puddle anywhere else must have seemed like a treasure in Tanaris, and she could imagine that in the grips of thirst, this amount of water would have been more precious than king's gold.

She pulled up the hems of her robe, tying them up at her hip, and waded into the water, ignoring the way her pants were getting soaked. The sand stirred, turning the water a turbulent brown, but Evelyn dunked her hands into the water, groping along the bottom for anything solid. Her claws sifted through the soft sand, stirring the pond from one end to the other, but no matter how meticulously she searched, all she ended up with were hands of wet sand.

She was growing doubtful in Mazoga's vision when she felt the fur on the back of her neck prick up; like there was a cold draft against the back of her head.

Heart sinking, she turned around.

Mazoga was there, standing on the shore, grinning from ear to ear. Too much grinning. His teeth were yellow, and blood-stained, and he looked entirely too pleased.

Suddenly, it all slotted into place perfectly, and Evelyn was burdened with sudden and undeniable understanding of what had been obvious from the start, but that she had dismissed because she thought she should not trust in appearance alone.

"Joke's on you, mon," he said, looking down at Evelyn from the edge of the pond, and past her into the disturbed water. His grin grew a fraction wider. He reached behind, and removed a sword from where it was hanging on his belt. "I found Jang'thraze long ago," he continued, weighing the sword in his hand. "Had both of de halves... 'til some wily one come and steal one away in de night."

He produced Sang'thraze next, and the air prickled with some intense force of attraction between the two swords, just barely kept from each other like lovers cruelly preventing from embrace.

"Now dat Sang'thraze is mine again," he said, looking at Evelyn like he expected her to know what he was going to say, but allow him to finish anyway, "de only thing ya be findin' here... is ya own fresh grave."

It was not even a good line, was what galled Evelyn the most. But the underwhelming performance on Mazoga's part was quickly replaced by the impressive light show of Sang'thraze and Jang'thraze snapping together into a single sword, crackling with vicious power that made Evelyn's fur stand on end.

"Behold!" Mazoga yelled unnecessarily, embracing the role of copper theater villain with gusto. "Sul'thraze the Lasher be rejoined!"

His smile was wild, and his hair was standing on end just like Evelyn's fur, caught up in the static of power. His eyes were bright--not aglow like when he was on a spirit vision, but proud of himself instead, filled to the brim with the mad strength of the sword in his hand.

He was a fraction too slow to return his attention to Evelyn, and so she was already throwing her body into him as he was trying to bring the sword down on her, and she was inside his guard as the sharp blade swung through the place she'd been standing a moment before. She called on the holy fire to burn him as they both tumbled to the ground, and she was glad she'd tied her robes up, because their soggy hems would have tripped her up.

She suspected that Mazoga was no more a hand-to-hand fighter than she was--he called on spirits, and he brandished Sul'thraze like it was a wand instead of a sword. They grappled with each other inexpertly, both spellcasters out of their element, and Evelyn had the incongruously hilarious memory of seeing two gnome arcanists get into a slapfight once. But Mazoga had the wiry strength of a troll, and Evelyn had the lithe form of a worgen, and even at a disadvantage they had more capacity for inflicting raw damage than other races might have, so their contest did not look quite so ridiculous. She got a good swipe at the side of his chest, three lines of dark blood blooming through torn bandages. He knocked the hilt of Sul'thraze against her snout, and she tasted her own blood.

She spat every word of power and smite she could shape the Holy Light into, and she felt the pounding, splitting pain of shadow damage from Mazoga's own magic tearing through her mind, making her casting stutter. Mazoga snarled, and she growled, and the sand flew around them as they scuffled, but eventually, Mazoga got his knee against her chest, and kicked her aside, sending her flying into the nearby pond of water.

She emerged from the water immediately, drenched and furious, brandishing her mace.

Mazoga scampered to his feet, bloodied as much as she was, and frustrated by his own bad showing.

"Enough'a dis!" he said, raising Sul'thraze as magic gathered around it in a dense cloud. "Chief Sandscalp can't reward me if I'm dead, yah?" Mazoga sneered, releasing Sul'thraze's attack. "Farewell, mon... for good."

Sul'thraze's attack lashed through her mind like a migraine, sending her vision blank for a few moments. Evelyn blinked quickly, gathering her healing magic to put herself back together before she went for a second round, but when her vision cleared, Mazoga was gone. She was standing alone, sticky-wet, in the dawning Tanaris sun.

She felt immeasurably stupid, and suspected she looked the part.

* * *

She limped back to Sandsorrow Watch, for lack of anything else to do. The cages there still held their occupants: the zombie as impassive as ever, but the other troll, with brown-stained teeth so similar to Mazoga's, now took notice of her, and grinned his awful grin. 

Trenton didn't quite curse when Evelyn told him about Mazoga, but he rubbed his eyes tiredly. 

"That foul traitor..." he muttered to himself. "I should've known better than to trust his kind. My hunt for Sul'thraze has blinded me."

He looked at Evelyn, his hand falling from his eyes, and though she expected to be given some new assignment, some next step to perform, Trenton looked altogether done with the entire affair. He shook his head.

"Forgive me, Evelyn. Mazoga has fled inside of Zul'Farrak, the heart of the Sandfury civilization." His finger traced the horizon in the rough direction of Zul'Farrak. She'd glimpsed the walls of it, stacked high and beaten by sand, but hadn't given any thought to going into the city. "If you truly seek the sword, you must pursue him," Trenton continued, going on an assumption that almost startled Evelyn. "Do not go alone; the entirety of the Sandfury tribe lies in wait behind those walls, and they will not welcome you."

Evelyn could have guessed as much, which made it all the more surprising that Trenton would assume she would want to go anywhere near the place. A sword wasn't worth this much trouble, surely. A single troll even less so.

"I will stay here," Trenton said--of course, as he had stayed there from the start, letting Evelyn run Mazoga's bloody errands. The high elf had a distant look in his eyes, introspective even as his gaze fixed on the middle distance with an air of elegant regret. "My search for the blade must end. Should you find it, keep it; I must give up before I am consumed."

With that dramatic declaration, he turned away, leaving Evelyn numb and uncertain in the middle of camp.

She did not care for the stupid sword. She did not want to go into Zul'Farrak. The entire notion was idiotic.

* * *

And like an idiot, instead of turning east and going into Gadgetzan, she turned west.

She did not go into Zul'Farrak--not alone, and not at all if she had any sense. But she could look, from a distance, towards the narrow entrance and to Zul'Farrak's weathered walls. She did not know why she was drawn here, and hoped it was not some latent obsession with Sul'thraze. It would be fine work indeed, for Trenton not be consumed by obsession, only for Evelyn to fall to it instead.

But no. What she sought was less tangible than a sword. Perhaps it was closure. Perhaps she was driven by revenge against Mazoga. Perhaps she needed to see him with the Sandfury and understand how unjustified her feelings of betrayal truly were, because he had never been anything else but what he had appeared: a liar and a deceiver, and a brazen one at that.

She didn't know, and she ought not have cared, but she set camp under the sand, and resolved to head to Gadgetzan in the morning.

She slept restlessly that night, and dreamed about being back at Sandsorrow Watch, sitting by the fire at night. Across from her, Mazoga was sitting with Sul'thraze on his knee.

This was almost a memory--she did recall sitting with him like this once, though he did not have the sword--but he had been silent then.

Now he pointed in the distance, where the walls of Zul'Farrak were looming nearer in dreams than they did in reality, and he spoke about the Great Shattering, and how Zul'Farrak had been part of the Gurubashi Empire before that. But the jungle had withered, the animals had died, the water had dried up; and yet the trolls remained, and survived.

You could only survive in the desert, he explained, not prosper. They clung to the collapsed walls of their civilization, never again to rise to those heights again, and every generation more of the stonework broke off, and was ground into sand by the lashing desert winds.

"Ya need blood to thrive," Mazoga spoke in the dream, and perhaps this was something he'd said to her awake, once, too. "But dey always be takin' it from you. Everyone. Everyt'ing. An' you spend all ya time thinking on how ta take it from dem. Can't build empires on sand, mon. Dis place be killin' us by inches, an' making us strong in de process."

It was contradictory, like something dictated by dream logic, but Evelyn thought she understood. She felt an unaccountable stab of pity for the trolls, who were such hardy creatures that even in the worst conditions, in places that nobody should live, they yet managed to survive. But the pity sputtered out in a wave of indignation that seemed to roll off Mazoga in reaction to her thought.

"Wat choice be dere, but to live?" he asked, sneering through a mouth smeared with blood.

And Evelyn understood that, at least. Life could be miserable, but lying down and giving up was cowardice, and anything else was better. She knew that lesson like only a Gilnean had learned it: the night elves had saved them, but their mercy also burned unbearably to Gilnean pride. But you lived. You continued. You survived, even if you did not prosper, because the alternative was that you died.

Evelyn woke after that, uneasy and disturbed by the dream, and she blinked her eyes open only moments, to see the moon still hanging overhead, and then turn over to go back to sleep. The dream had already slipped through her memory like sand between the fingers, and she would not recall it ever again.

* * *

Dawn broke golden over Tanaris, but it was only softly warm yet in the first moments as the sun stretched out its hand over the dunes. Evelyn was already awake to see it, sat down on a piece of broken masonry.  She looked off to the east, as the world teetered between night and day, and as her thoughts wandered, she felt the fur on the back of her neck prickle, as if stirred by a cold draft.

She inhaled sharply, more angered than startled, and looked up to the translucent form of Mazoga's spirit, grinning a blood-smeared grin down at her, his body limned in dawnlight.

"How you doin', mon?" he said conversationally, with none of the petty meanness she expected.

"You're dead," Evelyn replied bluntly, as remorseless as if she had given him the sentence herself. Perhaps she had. If she had never given him Sang'thraze, he might still be loitering at Sandsorrow Watch, and she would not be thinking about knocking down Zul'Farrak's door.

He laughed bitterly at her reaction, throwing his hands out to indicate his incorporeal form.

"Take a good look, mon. Dis is how it goes, betrayal after betrayal. I backstab you for the sword, and den Chief Ukorz go and backstab me even better for it." He made an illustrative stabbing motion towards his own neck then, his grin bitter and self-effacing. "That's life, yah! Or was..."

He trailed off, looking to the ground thoughtfully. Evelyn wondered if he had any shame for his actions. Perhaps not for backstabbing her, but for sending her after his own tribesmen to extract their blood. He had likely thought that, operating through her, he would avoid blame for those deaths. His chief, she suspected, did not feel the same. Or perhaps Mazoga had failed in some other way; or, worse still, perhaps he was merely victim of his own success. There were countless ways to die in the desert, and innumerably more reasons for Sandfury to kill.

"Now, I know you don't got no love for Mazoga," he said looking up at her, and she gave him a look that she hoped was appropriately withering. He scratched his cheek awkwardly, and this was as strong an admission of remorse that she was going to get from him. He doubled down, "But I know you goin' in der anyway." 

Evelyn huffed, feeling foolish and suspecting that what had drawn her to Zul'Farrak, that impulse she couldn't explain, had been coming from Mazoga working some kind of spirit magic even from beyond the grave. Could that be done? Evelyn wasn't sure, but perhaps Mazoga had some spirits who owed him one. Some troll god who'd think it was funny to do this for him.

Or maybe there was no subtle magic ministrations being worked on her. Maybe it was that she needed closure, and that had its own inexorable pull.

"Kill him for me, mon," Mazoga said in almost a whisper, and managed to jar Evelyn out of her thoughts anyway. She looked up at him, and he looked back, his eyes wide and his voice pitched low; not pleading--not stooping so low as that--but wanting her to do this for him anyway. "Spill more blood on the sand, an' give Chief Ukorz Sandscalp what every one of de Sandfury deserves... a gory death."

He quirked a grin at her then, strained as he tried for sincerity.

"Maybe I leave some of my belongin's without a curse before passin' on if you do, yah?" he offered, before the sun grew too bright, and the sight of him faded like morning mist melting into the noon air.

* * *

In Gadgetzan, she had enough coin for a room at the inn. The room was partly underground, and the clay walls kept the interior cool. For the first time in weeks, Evelyn had a proper bed, and so she slept like the dead throughout the night.

She even had enough coin for a bath, which meant lukewarm water in a copper tub. She supposed after the heat outside, not many people were pushing for hot water. She turned human for the bath, seeing as bare skin was easier to scrub than large tracts of fur, and when she sank into the water with a shiver, she felt more vulnerable than could be accounted for.

Now that she was in Gadgetzan, what she had to do was find more work. There was enough fauna in the outlying deserts that she was sure some goblin or another was going to want it slaughtered, and if she kept her ear open, she was going to find out which one and how much it would cost.

What she found herself doing instead, to her frustration, was putting out a query for any adventurers heading into Zul'Farrak, and whether they wanted a healer for their party.

It was utterly foolish, but when she curled up on the floor and re-did her pack, after selling assorted bits of trash and useless pieces of equipment to vendors who would take the items, she took out a satchel where she kept her books. The satchel was enchanted cloth--flimsy in appearance, but meant to keep the paper inside dry and unstained.

One of the books was her Manual of Discipline, the dog-eared copy that she'd grabbed out of a half-collapsed church before fleeing Gilneas. She didn't know what had happened to her own copy of the book, the one that she had used throughout her training and annotated thoroughly, but though the underlined passages and notes on the margins of this copy were done by someone else, she found she didn't mind. The writing was clear, and slanted, and similar to the hand that many priesthood initiates learned to write in, so that church ledgers would look uniform even when kept by different people.

The Manual of Discipline, with its many instructions on the many ways in which the Light could be worked, had been invaluable on her journeys. Every smite and curse and word of power Evelyn knew had come from it.

But she put the manual aside for now, and took out the Prayerbook from the satchel. A slimmer volume than the Manual of Discipline, this one was also instructional, but specialized in healing. A more useful skill in a group, particularly for a priest.

Not that she intended to fall into a group. She planned to work on her own, for the foreseeable future.

But she dithered. She packed and repacked, she paced her room, she spent the rest of the day at the inn's bar, drinking nothing but purified water and eating crackers, and sooner than she expected--sooner than she wished--a goblin tugged on her sleeve, and slipped her the news that a small group of adventurers were preparing to go into Zul'Farrak.

She hesitated still, until she heard they were chasing Sul'thraze as well; a group of mercenaries had been caught along Zul'Farrak's walls seeking the sword, and now this band of adventurers had hired on to rescue the hapless captives.

Evelyn pressed a hand against her forehead, the closest she could get to pinching the bridge of her nose when it was now in the shape of a snout, and briefly wondered who would come after them if they got captured as well. But then, if she was thinking about the question, it meant she'd already decided on going along, and so the next evening, she sidled up to whoever seemed to be the leader of the adventurers, and introduced herself.

* * *

They approached Zul'Farrak during the evening, traveling from Gadgetzan. Crossing Tanaris during the night was easier for everyone, regardless of night vision, but they were going to attack during the day, because most of the group needed light to see.

The leader, a laconic dwarf warrior with the kind of thoughtful glower Evelyn always liked to see in someone taking charge, watched the walls of Zul'Farrak through a spyglass, picking out guards and deciding their approach as everyone else set up camp. Evelyn wasn't entirely sure how much she was going to be able to see in daylight, but there was a draenei engineer in the group who made a pair of goggles with dark lenses for Evelyn, and that turned out to be a good enough solution.

Mazoga's spirit, as if bound by the walls of the city, appeared to her a few times more before the fighting started. She considered haughtily ignoring him, looking away and pretending she did not hear, because he was dead and that meant he had no say, but he had no jabs for her anymore. Death seemed to have softened him somewhat; perhaps the fight for survival had always been the one to make him the way he was, and now without it he could be more a person, and less a vicious force of nature jostling for his place in the world.

He told her of life inside the walls, and of the resistance they would encounter. He told her of the ones who would need killing for her group to come out alive.

Though she had great misgivings about this, she passed the information on to the rest of the group, and if they asked how she knew, she told them it was what she had gleaned from Mazoga, and their assumption, then, was that she had learned it when he'd been still alive.

* * *

There was nothing much to say about Zul'Farrak. It was miserable, bloody fighting through endless waves of trolls. They killed their way through tamed beasts, and ruthlessly eliminated the entire leadership of the city, interrupted a summoning ritual that would have called some destructive god into the world, and rescued the captive mercenaries.

It was an unbearable slog, that they persisted in completing through sheer bloody-mindedness, and at the end, when Chief Ukorz Sandscalp was dead, and Sul'thraze was in their hands, Evelyn let the adventurers have it, and bicker over it as they pleased.

She stepped away to strip a set of ceremonial robes off a dead troll priestess, and luckily they were a good fit, because Evelyn's own robes had become bloodied and torn through the ordeal, and she did not think there was enough left of them to be worth fixing. The robes she looted were also much airier, being completely slit on the sides of the torso in a fashion that would have galled Evelyn's Gilnean sense of propriety once. But it was the desert, it was hot, and she had more than enough fur to ward her modesty, and so she did not care.

The group broke off at the entrance of Zul'Farrak, no longer linked by mutual interest, and Evelyn let them go ahead without her.

She lingered near the entrance of Zul'Farrak for a while, looking back and wondering if this was closure, or if there had been any point to that endeavor at all. A few months later, she would hear through the inter-faction rumor mill that the Sandfury finally abandoned their collapsing city, and gone to join up with the Zandalari. They grew sick of being ground under the heels of both Horde and Alliance, and decided to throw their lot in with the Zandalari, who were in the process of recruiting allies.

She would know, then, that she'd been there too when their Sandfury tribe's back was finally broken, and she would feel no special sense of accomplishment for delivering to them more brutality in an already unforgiving world. But she would also think, _good_ \--let the Sandfury leave the desert that had twisted them so. Let them go to Zandalar, where they could be trolls among trolls, and live out their lives knowing shade and never thirsting. Let them not cling to walls, thinking that walls could keep a people safe, or a civilization thriving.

But for now, she was alone, and Mazoga with her, looking off to Zul'Farrak.

"He's gone?" Mazoga asked quietly. "Did he have the sword?" But when she turned to look at him, he was already shaking his head. "Nah... don't tell me. Don't matter no more. Mazoga don't care."

He looked off into the distance--not at anything in this world, she thought. Perhaps something on the other side, up in the sky. He smiled, and it was sincere, for once.

"I'm off now, mon," he said. "De consequences of my actions await me. Take whatever I was holdin'... I don't need it where I'm goin'..."

A breeze picked up, lapping at a dune near the entrance to reveal a corpse beneath the sand. Mazoga, she recognized. His chief had apparently not even seen fit to use him for a zombie. Evelyn wanted to say something--condolences for his own death, perhaps--but Mazoga's spirit was already gone as she looked, disappeared once again.

She wondered if there was a sliver of overlap in the afterlife where her prayers as a priest of the Light would help Mazoga. But she had always heard that trolls had dark gods, and she hoped that this meant he would end up somewhere cool and dark in death, like the shaded jungles of Stranglethorn. She did not think the troll gods had a very good view of traitors, and Mazoga was a traitor two times over. Oh, the one against her likely didn't count, but he'd betrayed other trolls. 

Yet even so, if his punishment was to be sent to the bottom of a cold, dark pit, she still though he would find some way to endure. The Sandfury lived too wretched a life to be outmatched by any punishment.

She looked to the sky, trying to match the direction Mazoga had been looking in, and when she breathed out she put Zul'Farrak behind her. She had learned nothing here, except for the reason Tanaris always smelled like dust and blood.

It was time to go elsewhere.


End file.
